I’m very unconvinced by this episode. Sarah Jane sums it up: they’re all stuck waiting until Z-list UNIT solider Major Beresford comes up with something. The Doctor warns Scorby ‘bullets and bombs aren’t the answer to everything’ and not to try to escape the house, as he’ll never make it through the killer veg. Then, the Doctor decides bullets and bombs are, in fact, the answer to everything: Major Beresford calls in the RAF and blows up the Krynoid while the Doctor and Sarah Jane escape the house and make it through the killer veg. I’m afraid this just won’t do at all. And the final, Avengers-style tag scene is rubbish.

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The first part of this episode is genuine base under siege stuff, with strong Night of the Living Dead overtones as the Doctor, Sarah, Scorby and some toughs spend the night in a cottage while the Krynoid prowls outside, and tensions grow between the survivors. It’s tense: Baker practically spits half his dialogue, but I think it’s a bit of a shame they jumped the gun and gave the Krynoid a voice. Its bargain with Scorby for the Doctor’s life doesn’t go anywhere, and it would have been better to have it as a horrible, unknowable presence in the darkness rather than a standard Doctor Who whispering villain.

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After the last episode had to pivot the story from a claustrophobic base under siege to a quirky thriller, this feels a little more focused and compelling. Interestingly, having opened the story out last week, it now begins to narrow focus again, with Chase’s mansion promising to become a new base under siege from the Keeler/Krynoid (which develops more rapidly than the first version, to the point where this ends with a Slyther-like blob lurching towards the camera).

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This serial often gets compared to The Avengers, which Robert Banks Stewart also wrote for. It frequently included eccentric villains with peculiar fixations, such as cats or the planet Venus. It also featured an episode called Man-Eater of Surrey Green (written by Philip Levene) which had an alien vegetable controlling people, an eccentric, horticulture-obsessed millionaire and a batty old lady who loves plants, so it’s not hard to see why people make the connection. But to me this more resembles The New Avengers, with a brutal streak quite different from the cartoonish violence of Peel-era Avengers, or Pertwee-era UNIT stories.

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The scenes with Tony Beckley as the brilliantly disdainful Harrison Chase, icier than the Antarctic, are really the only thing that makes this tautly effective little horror story feel like part of a bigger narrative. The Doctor and Sarah Jane could almost as easily have blown the base up, saved the world and flown off for more adventures in space and time, and this would still have been a more satisfying and complete story than The Sontaran Experiment.

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If The Brain of Morbius felt like the companion piece to Pyramids of Mars, this makes a neat pair with Terror of the Zygons: same writer, director, composer and contemporary Earth setting. It recaptures the slightly eerie quality of the earlier story, the sense of the uncanny intruding into the real world, taking its time to establish its characters without over-burdening the audience with too much plot. Broadly, this all works so effectively B-movie lines like, ‘It’s as if he’s turning into some sort of a hideous monster’ just wash over us.

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This wraps up the story with all the appropriate efficiency of a Hammer Films finale, and a lot of violence. The body count isn’t particularly large, but each death – even hapless Sister Kelia, throttled by Morbius while out for a stroll – seems to count. Condo gets to sacrifice himself to save his pretty Sarah Jane (although he’s denied the irony of being choked to death by his own hand). Maren sacrifices herself so the Doctor might live, ruefully wondering if he wasn’t right about endings after all.

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This is still witty: Solon enjoys mocking Condo’s attraction to Sarah Jane, ‘Oh, he’s such a romantic’ (before adding, ‘That’ll do she doesn’t like it’), and can’t even resist making an ‘irresistible’ pun about Morbius’ crowning irony (‘Fool,’ snaps back an unamused Morbius). The prosaic explanation for the death of the Flame of Eternal Life (soot), and Morbius’ gloriously quotable rant (‘Even a sponge has more life than I!’) are superb. But Holmes also introduces the same kind of philosophical angle that lifted Genesis of the Daleks.

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One thing I hadn’t noticed when I’ve watched The Brain of Morbius in the past, usually in an attempt to make it through the whole serial in one go, is how funny the script is. Robert Holmes does love a good villainous rant (recently we’ve had ‘Abase yourself, you grovelling insect’ and Sharaz Jek’s ‘stinking offal’ monologues still to come). But this opens with a wonderful stream of vitriol from the frustrated Solon, who’s just had his magnificent head stolen from under his nose:

That squalid brood of harpies, the Sisterhood. That accursed hag Maren found I was holding a Time Lord and rescued him. May her stinking bones rot! I’ll see her die, Condo. I’ll see that palsied harridan scream for death before Morbius and I are finished with her.

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This is immediately positioned as another significant step towards revealing more about the Time Lords and the Doctor’s past, connecting it to Pyramids of Mars both visually and thematically. Like Sutekh, the Sisterhood of Karn know of, and are contemptuous towards the High Council of the Time Lords, whom they suspect of coming to Karn to steal the Elixir. Separately, Solon dismisses the Time Lords as ‘spineless parasites’ (how the mighty have fallen: the last time Philip Madoc was in the show talking about Time Lords they were demigods).

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